How do you know when your company is heading south?
Maybe your team has been outsourced to Bangalore? Or your entire executive staff is arrested for insider trading? Or 60 Minutes starts investigating an 'incident' involving your product? Or perhaps its more subtle:
Perhaps management has killed the free donuts.
You think I'm joking, but the decision to kill the Monday morning donuts is one of the most consistent harbingers of a company's demise that I've seen in the valley. When management decides to kill the bagels, it means they are circling the wagons. Since they can't get away with creating new profit streams at the expense of employees (say, charging you for monthly parking), they start looking for any conceivable way to cut costs and secure their fiscal fortress.
They spin an excellent web of guilt for the folks on the front-line, too:
If you add up all those bagels and cream cheese over the year, the total cost is equal to one employee.
Pshaw! The implication, of course, is that when the layoffs come, they'll be able to spare you or one of your co-worker plebes from the unemployment line because everyone went without... So, you wouldn't be able to enjoy that poppy-seed number with a clean conscience, anyway, would you?
It's easy to rationalize cutting these trivial expenses, but if you step back and think about it, it turns out this isn't rational at all: First, the employees are going to be upset because they've had something taken away that was perceived as a birth right, not a privilege. Second, they're not going to stop eating donuts just because they aren't convenient. They're going to take a slow walk down the street and get their muffins and coffee at Starbucks. So now you have de-moralized employees that aren't even in the office while they're out plotting management's demise. You can pretty much guarantee this drain far exceeds the cost of a few dozen double-glazed.
So as soon as you notice a cash box next to the Krispy Kremes in the break room, start thinking about your next career move. Because when the donuts are gone, all that's left are the holes.